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WHERE WE GET OUR NEWS

Some may worry that this blog–itself firmly encamped in digital media–is becoming a cyber refuge for old-fashioned, papyrus-loving cranks. Guilty. But I harbour no deep-seated distaste for screen-based media. While I will miss paper, its persistence is not my main worry. Rather, it is the journalism that paper supports that I fear for.

Until the old newspaper barons–the few that remain–can sort out a business model that does not rely on print advertising and subscriptions, I will remain sceptical that an adequate amount of news gathering can survive. Actual news, what goes on in foreign lands and on our local high streets, still originates mostly from overworked and underpaid print journalists. Web-based new media is a wonderful dimension, and I benefit from it everyday. But it cannot replace the work of the dinosaurs.

New-media high-flyers, such as Arianna Huffington, who started the fantastically successful Huffington Post, can bloviate to the contrary all they want. But I'm not convinced. I once attended a talk where she claimed that unlike the mainstream media, her outfit is not concerned with objectivity for the sake of it; she's after the truth. Thank goodness for all of us that she and her blogger army can still rely on old media to find it. To be fair, they do publish some original reporting nowadays, funded partially by philanthropists. Maybe this is the future, but I hope not.

This is not a case for paper for the sake of it, but about what some are appositely calling the health of the news ecosystem. The Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism has just published a fresh and sobering study that tries to answer the question, "Where does the news come from in today’s changing media?" After looking at the local news cycle for a week in Baltimore (of "The Wire" fame), researchers found that "what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media-particularly newspapers". Baltimore's readers, listeners, watchers and tweeters get news in all sorts of ways, but 80% of it is recycled, with no original reporting, and 95% of the stories that do feature original reporting come from traditional media sources, mainly newspapers. Perhaps Baltimore's bloggers took the week off, or the Pew researchers did not ask around enough. But they looked at 53 local news outlets, and it seems that most of them still need to pick up the Baltimore Sun.

It is then too bad that the Sun is a shadow of its former self. Rounds of budget cuts and redundancies forced the paper to close its foreign bureaus, and in 2009 it produced 32% fewer stories than in 1999 and 73% fewer than in 1991 (when the paper had a morning and evening edition), according to the Pew study.

To stretch the ecosystem metaphor a bit further: I'm all for biodiversity, but not if the new species destroy the food chain we, and they, rely on.

~ ALEXANDER EWING

Picture credit: stuartpilbrow (via Flickr)